Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

i don't disagree. but what's more important? personally i'd vote on people being able to be heard. however, those messages are diluted or hidden if massive amounts of bots are spamming something else

Based on what?

This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it.

(If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.)

But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and machine-generated content (“a picture of you from three years ago”).

In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it.

Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back.

Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.

Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items.

I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during the last 8 years, I don't know. If anyone posts anything too personal right now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with everyone watching.

No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return.

People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many frequently opt out after a tiff.

I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very safe and personal to share updates.